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Comment by robopsychology | Hacker News Reader

There's been several armed robberies in Palo Alto Midtown recently - I personally don't mind increased security if it reduces those.

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You're in the bullseye of the law enforcement pitch then. There are lots of ways to address armed robberies without mass surveillance. They'll pitch this as "one more tool to fight crime <x>" but you wait, it will actually be "THE tool for preventing a wide range of behaviors, some maybe even illegal!"

You've totally failed to respond to GP's comment. Do you think this will be ineffective at its stated goals?

I think it's very unlikely there will be a statistically significant increase in violent crime conviction rates when these cameras go into action.

Surveillance has never been greater -- are cities markedly less violent than in the past?

(No, urban/city violence is on the rise..[0])

[0]: https://www.city-journal.org/article/criminal-neglect

Crime has been on a largely downward trend since the 90s. Yes, there has been a partial reverse since 2020, associated with a general breakdown in norms during Covid. But the broader trend is down.

Please define "the past", because when I'm talking about lifetime trends I don't use 2019 as my baseline.

There are many of us who just don’t care about mass surveillance.

Back in 1968 the NYPD had an effective way to address armed robberies. Stake-out squad members would hide inside targeted businesses and then just shoot the robbers. However, this approach has fallen out of favor in modern law enforcement.

https://qualitypolicing.com/the-stake-out-squad/

If Reddit is any guide, Brazil seems to have come up with the innovation of bystanders beating the crap out of any criminals they can catch in the act. Problematic for a lot of different reasons but you gotta admire the simplicity of the idea.

I agree mass surveillance is bad however is some surveillance good? Coming from London the fact there is basically no surveillance such that the police need to ask people if they were doing their own surveillance to help with a case strikes me as crazy. Each piece of surveillance should be rigorously questioned but I don't think the answer to a safe society is none.

Why would license plate cameras deter armed robberies? Aren't there other things that would be more effective? PA's police department doesn't seem to be lacking for funding, its budget has increased over time instead of being cut. Have the police been responding to callers with "sorry, we can't come take a report for your armed robbery because we're manually writing down license plate numbers"?

At best license plate cameras seem like they might deter bad driving if they make it easier to issue citations to bad drivers. I cannot imagine how they would meaningfully impact armed robberies or other violent crime. It's just more surveillance that in practice probably increases police dept income (via tickets). Maybe it slightly reduces the time police officers spend in courtrooms or writing up tickets, leaving them more time to respond to calls?

Don't let yourself get tricked into rubber stamping warrantless surveillance just because you want to be safer in some other area.

The primary effect of ALPRs in other cities has been to identify stolen cars as well as those registered to owners with open warrants. They aren't typically used for traffic enforcement.

Because most of the recent crimes where the robbers were caught drove into PA from Oakland or EPA or wherever and some of those were caught by license plate cameras just further afield. I wonder if one of the reasons Midtown is picked is because it's close to the 101 and because of the lack of security cameras. If people wanted to target wealthy people they'd be better suited looking towards Atherton or Woodside or something.

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